Walking on Two Legs Again

Is there no “healing” of any kind in this process?  I think that in the volcanic heat of his grieving, Jack Lewis overstates the case a bit.  On the one hand, with the proper help, equipment, therapy and hard work, an amputee may well become bipedal once again.  It will never be a natural thing.  The prosthetic limb will not be the same as the natural limb was.  There will be phantom pain, maintenance issues, limitations and complications.  But the person will be able to function in some semblance of “normal” after a period of time.

At first, I found myself falling over at nearly every step.  As I have talked with others in my shoes (or shoe, to follow the metaphor), I heard about the terrible absence of their “sounding board.”  Yes, yes, that’s just it!  Anne, do you think I should use your life insurance money to pay off some of the big debts and be done with them?  Or should I keep as much cash as possible in order to remain flexible?  I have the brains to figure out a helpful answer.  But the process that I used for three decades to come to such answers was no longer available to me.  I could ask other people for advice and input, and that certainly helped.  But it was not at all the same.

Anne made many large decisions for us when it came to household matters.  She researched our new furnace for months before coming to a decision.  I knew the conversation that was coming and just waited for it to happen.  “I need to show you the options for the furnace,” she said one day.  I wanted to say, “Sweetheart, you already know what you’re going to do.  Why do we need to go through this?”  But I had learned that this was part of our process.  She laid out all the pros and cons of the various brands, models and plans.  She charted out the rebates and discounts, the tax credits and energy savings.  She noted which of the units seemed to be the best deal.  Then she said, “So, what do you think?”

My dear heart had spent hours and hours of deliberation.  Now she wanted my assessment after fifteen minutes.  There were times in our life together when that conversation just about drove me over the edge.  But, as Anne would say, “talking about it helps me think it through once more.”  So I walked through what I observed and gave my opinion.  Of course, my opinion was exactly what she had already decided, because she had done such good homework.  But she needed that validation of her thinking.  She did a great job buying that new furnace.  Thank you, honey.

You see, that’s one of the things I missed so much that simply could not be replaced. After she died, I needed to talk through many decisions.  I leaned in Anne’s direction, and there was no one there.  I fell over in a heap and started to cry again.  This is why we who have lost spouses spend so much time talking to them after they are dead.  That’s better than collapsing in the middle of a conversation because no answers are forthcoming.  It took time to learn how to process things without my dialogue partner.  It took time to walk on two legs again.

I found that I became somewhat “bipedal” in my grieving process after a while.  I am learned to a small degree to walk through life as one person again rather than as one-half of two people.  It was a difficult adjustment, and I never really got the hang of it.  I had been so accustomed to leaning to my left as I walked that now the whole world seemed out of balance.  Anne almost always walked and sat on my left, probably due to my own left-handedness.  She even tipped her head to my left when we kissed.  Suddenly I found no one there when I leaned over, either physically or emotionally.  Sometimes I lost my balance and fell.

It was difficult in these early days to attend public functions as a single person.  I did so with family and friends, and I enjoyed those outings for the most part.  But I felt “off” and out of kilter.  I’ve heard from people who have been single their whole life long that they too feel odd in such settings.  I’m sorry for that since we live in such a single-unfriendly culture (especially in the Midwest and especially in most churches).  But I must protest that it is not the same.  Feeling like the fifth wheel is painful, but it is not the same as having lost one’s balancing partner.

Did I learn to stand upright on my own?  Yes, I did to some degree.  Is that a kind of “healing”?  Yes, it seems that it is.  Sometimes what I experienced was a kind of hunger, at least in emotional terms.  I’ve never really been food-deprived, so I am reluctant to use the metaphor of starvation.  Nonetheless, parts of my emotional and mental life seemed to be crying out for sustenance and none was forthcoming.

Of course, all that changed in April of 2011 when I walked through Brenda's front door and knew that I wasn't going to leave.